“For [completing - trans.] big jobs, we received leave, they lent us a leave uniform, otherwise we were constantly guarded behind walls. To begin with we were guarded by the interior guards, they had purple shoulder marks. They guarded us with assault rifles and watched us slave away, and they said: ‘We’d gladly help you out so you wouldn’t have so much work to do, but we mustn’t touch anything. We have to guard you so you don’t run away.’ Then they got rid of it. [...] When we’d had enough, we’d break one another’s pickaxe and go to get new ones. The new pickaxes and spades were at a place a long way away, we’d walk an hour there and an hour back. So we’d skip work for two hours.”
“Every plane had a bomb under its wing. They attacked the train station in Dobřichovice. All those bombs landed next to the Dobřichovice station. They all fell into the fields. [...] He wasn’t able to drop one of the bombs, so he flew around until the bomb fell off over Vráž [a part of Mokropsy - ed.]. We were just on our way to school, that was in March 1945. [...] Suddenly, we see him drop the bomb, so we laid flat, and the bomb fell on the road. [...] Old Makoň was taking his grandsons by cart, they copped it. Those were the only victims. [...] Lessons were cancelled from then on.”
“[Q: What training did they give you?] None. Drill training. To distinguish between a second lieutenant and a first lieutenant and salute. We had three weeks of training in Komárno, and the fourth week we were already sent off to construction sites and mine work. I was sent to Fulnek in Moravia. We demolished the beautiful Fulnek monastery there. They confiscated it after 1945 and sent [the monks] away. So it was demolished [and rebuilt - ed.] into a barracks. From there I was sent to Dubnice nad Váhom, we did the jobs that normal people wouldn’t. They didn’t care if the place collapsed on us or not, we delved a seven-kilometre-long tunnel there.”
Karel Vošalík was born on 8 June 1932 in Dolní Mokropsy, which is now a part of Černošice near Prague. He is the descendant of the farmer family of Vošalík, which had lived and farmed on the historical estate of “Famelie” from the eighteenth century. His father Karel Vošalík (1893-1965) was the mayor of Mokropsy during the First Republic period. After the war Karel completed training at an agricultural school, but he could not work on the family farm as it was confiscated by the state in 1950. The family was at least allowed to continue living on it. As the son of a kulak, Karel served in the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (AEC) from 1952 to 1954. He worked at construction sites in northern Moravia and in Slovakia. He worked in agriculture his whole life. In 2016 he lived on his family’s “Famelie” in Dolní Mokropsy near Prague.
